Japanese American T shirts from way back - Who done it?

Sep 25, 2009

Does anyone out there know who made these T-Shirts? I don’t know what I’d do if I had the information, but these are the prototypes for what’s become the racist t-shirts made by conglomerate companies all over the world. Yet, this particular brand was made in the 70s and maybe 80s by a company who must have been local to Southern California, Japanese American, and I had a bunch of them, and wore them religiously. It was a form of yellow power. Shirts by “us” and for “us”. I remember one saying, Kamikaze Taxi, need a cab, with a full buck toothed driver of a cab that was in old school hot rod Ratfink style. Another was Ichibun with a samurai scratching his ass. I had the Year of the Cock shirts, and of course they had one for each Asian zodiac animal. Then there was monku monku monku – bitch bitch bitch. There were probably more that I don’t remember. The one above, Rotsa Ruck is one that I don’t remember at all. Look at the color of the shirt first of all.

One of the best parts was the geta slippers on the front as a chest print. That was their logo, but they never did neck tags, so I have no idea what they were called. I bought this at a resale vintage shop for $18. They had another logo, a rising sun with a stereotypical buck toothed dude in the center of it. I wish I had those shirts too.